Continuing Professional Development
CPD
Professional competence
What is CPD?
CPD (Continuing Professional Development) refers to the learning you do to develop or maintain the knowledge and skills you need to succeed in your career and maintain your professional competence. The most important thing is to focus on its relevance to your current role and your future career ambitions.
CPD is important because it demonstrates your competence as you keep yourself up to date. It instils self confidence, and inspires confidence in those who work with you. And by demonstrating your commitment to learning, you are more likely to be given opportunities to progress in your career.
A commitment to professional development enables society to have confidence in the engineering profession.
Your commitment
Plan, Do & Reflect
Plan
Take ownership of your career and create a Personal Development Plan to log what you want to achieve in the next 12 months, and further ahead. What objectives would your 5-year plan include?
Do
The learning activity you do to meet the objectives in your PDP, as well as additional opportunities that arise, should be logged in your CPD record. This should be a broad range of activities. You are expected to support the development of others too.
As a RailEI member, you will gain access to a vast array of opportunities to enhance your professional development.
Reflect
This is crucial. Reflect on your activity and consider what you learnt, what changes it brought about and what action it prompted. These thoughts are personal to you. You might also like to reflect on the year as a whole: did you achieve your goals or will some carry forward, are there topics you’d like to explore further? Reflection completes the circle of continuing development.
Any learning activity can count as CPD as long as it is relevant to your career role or future career aspirations
Examples of what counts as CPD
Probably more activity than you realise counts as CPD!
Probably more activity than you realise counts as CPD: it certainly isn’t just going on formal training courses required for your job. Try to ensure there is a variety of learning activity in your records – whether that be in-house, external, from your professional body, or personal.
Take a look at the breadth of examples – and this list is not exhaustive!
Examples
- Attending or delivering technical training courses
- Presenting at or attending seminars and conferences
- Attending RailEI Section meetings
- Supporting professional bodies – eg RailEI volunteer roles
- Undertaking research
- Writing or contributing to publications and articles
- Attending or delivering workshops
- Studying for examinations
- Participating in technical discussions
- On the job training and site visits
- Participating in committees or panels
- Delivering or receiving coaching or mentoring
- Personal activity – eg reading, watching, listening to relevant material
- Supporting community projects using your engineering skills.
CPD Exemplars
Struggling to know what should go into your record? Explore our CPD Exemplars for EngTech, IEng and CEng to see real life examples of good practice Continuing Professional Development records. The Personal Development Plans are included too, so you can see how what they’ve done has contributed to their objectives. These exemplars also showcase the diverse paths engineers have taken to reach their professional goals – so you may also find inspiration on how to progress your engineering career! Gain insights, tips and strategies to help you navigate your own development journey and elevate your career in the engineering field.
CPD Annual Audit - A benefit for all!
Every year, we audit the CPD records of a sample of our membership. Our Professional Development Committee reviews these and individualised feedback is provided to the participants. We want all our members to benefit from this though – to encourage you to naturally engage in CPD and take ownership of your development. Your commitment to competence then benefits you, your employer, the wider industry, and society too.
My CPD is free for members
You are able to create and maintain records of your CPD by using RailEI My CPD e-portfolio. This is available to all members.
Helpful questions and answers
Questions and answers
Everyone! The RailEI Code of Professional Conduct requires all its members to maintain and develop their professional competence and support the development of others. This helps to demonstrate to the wider engineering community and the public, the continued competence, high safety levels and professionalism of engineers.
If you are professionally registered, or want to be, then you must create a record of your CPD activity to demonstrate your commitment to professional competence. This is required by the Engineering Council.
Each year, RailEI will randomly select a number of its members to submit their CPD records for review. Members will receive valuable feedback which will enhance their professional development. Submission is only mandatory for professionally registered members: persistent failure to respond to a request could result in removal from the Register. Full details of the requirements can be found in the Code of Professional Conduct, Section 5.
If you are not professionally active, then you can be exempted from the sample.
Your career and development goals are personal to you, but there might be some from a business need too, identified from appraisals with your employer. Your goals might be to keep up to date – but in a fast-evolving industry, there is always more to learn!
If you are pursuing professional registration, you should map which competences you can already demonstrate and where the gaps are. You can then plan for opportunities to give you the relevant experience you need.
Identify the goals you want to achieve in the year and by when, so you can include target completion dates against each objective. Including personal goals with professional goals can be useful as they are often interrelated. Once you have identified your objectives, then identify the activities and resources you will require to achieve them.
It is recommended that you complete at least 30 hours of CPD each year – but don’t stop doing or recording it, just because you hit that number! You might like to aim to record something every month.
You should plan your CPD activity to ensure it is relevant to your development needs and links back to your PDP goals, but additional opportunities will always present themselves through the challenges of working life and interactions with others.
As a member of the RailEI, you have access to a wide range of activities, designed to meet the needs of the railway engineer and keep you up to date with all the latest industry developments. Make the most of the opportunities we provide – seminars, events, Section meetings, Knowledge Hub resources, technical education courses, volunteer roles, and the Journal.
Doing CPD is easy. Recording it and reflecting on its impact takes a bit more time. My CPD lets you create and maintain records of your PDP and CPD and is available for free to all our members. It will populate your record with RailEI events as you book onto them, so all you need to do afterward is match it to your PDP objective and add your reflection! You will be able to add non-RailEI events and other activities too, and at any point you will be able to export your record and share it in whatever format you require.
There is no right or wrong way to log your CPD, so select the method that works best for you. It could be My CPD, paper files, a spreadsheet or your employer’s system. Whichever method you choose, preparing CPD records makes tracking and reviewing your development more straightforward.
Once you have completed an activity it is important you evaluate and reflect on your learning outcomes and establish if you have achieved your original objective. What have you gained to date, or what progress have you made towards your original goal? You may need more time to achieve it or it may no longer be valid.
If your original objective has been fully met you can mark the activity as ‘complete’. You could have an ongoing objective to maintain your competence.
This process of review and reflection should create a cyclical process, to help you determine and plan your future goals and needs.